I'm a bit let down by colloquial's Hungarian course. They fall into the trap of teaching less useful words first (I.e. Antrologopus ? Anthropologist), trying too subtly to introduce vocab (oh here's 4 sentences with new words not in the dialogue and one off translations , good luck remembering in exercise later!) . Are there any other good ground up books for Hungarian as a companion? Colloquial does good on grammar explanations, but terrible in structured learning. I've also had real bad hit and miss luck with teach yourself, and can't afford the $100us courses.

Teach Yourself Complete Hungarian gets 4.5 stars on Amazon's reviews. I have a copy (but haven't gone very far in it), and it starts out with plenty of useful vocab. I haven't gone far enough into it to give a comprehensive review of the course, but it looks solid.

It's a pity that Colloquial wasn't satisfactory; their Thai course is excellent.

I'm a bit let down by colloquial's Hungarian course. They fall into the trap of teaching less useful words first (I.e. Antropológus ? Anthropologist), trying too subtly to introduce vocab (oh here's 4 sentences with new words not in the dialogue and one off translations , good luck remembering in exercise later!) . Are there any other good ground up books for Hungarian as a companion? Colloquial does good on grammar explanations, but terrible in structured learning. I've also had real bad hit and miss luck with teach yourself, and can't afford the $100us courses.

If you don't worry much about the legal side of it, you can easily get your hands on some of the Hungarian courses, like Teach Yourself etc, on the internet and you don't even have to open your purse for it.

ling wrote:It's a pity that Colloquial wasn't satisfactory; their Thai course is excellent.

I usually tell people to get both Teach Yourself, for the dialogues, and Colloquial, for the Grammar and more through explanation. I have several others (Chinese, Serbian, and I think Czech or something), but this was my first dud. It still does do good on grammar, just really bad layout, dialogues and exercises.

@Weerwolf: Meh, not so much worried about the legal side, but I like to touch and feel. A book gives me something tactile to learn with. I have some learning Apps, and I even have an E-Book of my favorite series on my phone, but they totally pale in comparison to having something physical for me. I know people learn different ways, but I just can't learn effectively via computer.

Trapy wrote:@Weerwolf: Meh, not so much worried about the legal side, but I like to touch and feel. A book gives me something tactile to learn with. I have some learning Apps, and I even have an E-Book of my favorite series on my phone, but they totally pale in comparison to having something physical for me. I know people learn different ways, but I just can't learn effectively via computer.

What you can do once you downloaded a book, is that you go to a copyshop where you can print your file out and make a ”book” (by binding or spiral binding it) of it. I don’t know if you can do that where you live, but in Budapest this process costs only 5% - 10% of the original book’s actual price and you’ll have a ”real book” in your hand.